Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

Homosexuality and transgender of various types have also been reported from numerous indigenous cultures of South America, Asia, Africa, the Pacific islands, and Australia, and many of these cultures deserve further investigation in terms of how they perceive systems of gender and sexuality in animals. Two potentially rich sources of knowledge about animal homosexuality/transgender are the many aboriginal cultures of Africa and South America. The Mongandu people of Congo (Zaire), for example, have long known of the sexual activity (genito-genital rubbing) between female Bonobos, which they call hoka-hoka. Among the Hausa of Nigeria, transgendered men known as ’yan daudu (who are effeminate, usually married to women, and also sometimes have homosexual relations) are culturally linked to Cattle Egrets, a species in which heterosexually paired males do sometimes copulate with other males (Wrangham, R., and D. Peterson [1996] Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, p. 209 [New York: Houghton Mifflin]; Gaudio, R. P. [1997] “Not Talking Straight in Hausa,” p. 420-22, in A. Livia and K. Hall, eds., Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, pp. 416–29 [New York: Oxford University Press]). In South America, the U’wa people of Columbia have a myth involving copulation between a male fox and a male opossum, as well as various forms of gender mixing such as pregnancy in the male fox and transformation into a woman by the male opossum (Osborn, A. [1990] “Eat and Be Eaten: Animals in U‘wa [Tunebo] Oral Tradition,” pp. 152–53, in R. Wills, ed., Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World, pp. 140-–58 [London: Unwin Hyman]). The creation myth cycle of the Mundurucú people of the Amazon includes images of birds as symbols of anal birth and a male homosexual reproductive capacity, and the male tapir as a creature with symbolically female sexual organs, undergoing anal penetration and being sexually attracted to a man disguised as a woman (Nadelson, L. [1981] “Pigs, Women, and the Men’s House in Amazonia: An Analysis of Six Mundurucú Myths,” pp. 250, 254, 260–61, 270, in S. B. Ortner and H. Whitehead, eds., Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, pp. 240–72 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press]). And among the Waiwai and other cultures, the scent gland on the backs of both male and female peccaries is considered to have androgynous sexual functions (Morton, J. [1984] “The Domestication of the Savage Pig: The Role of Peccaries in Tropical South and Central America and Their Relevance for the Understanding of Pig Domestication in Melanesia,” pp. 43–44, 63, Canberra Anthropology 7:20–70). Undoubtedly many other similar examples remain to be discovered and studied, even within the culture areas surveyed here (New Guinea, Siberia/Arctic, and indigenous North America), since this topic has yet to be systematically investigated in the anthropological literature.

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Of course these four themes are not discrete or mutually exclusive, since they often overlap or interconnect in a particular culture, nor are they uniform either between or within cultures. They are used here simply as a way of organizing and discussing a wide range of beliefs and practices, thereby highlighting a number of their salient features. Throughout this section the “ethnographic present tense” is used, i.e., indigenous beliefs and practices are described as ongoing, contemporary occurrences even though some have been (or are being) actively suppressed and/or eradicated by colonizer and majority cultures and their legacy of homophobic attitudes (particularly in North America and Siberia). In spite of severe declines and disappearances in the face of nearly insurmountable obstacles, however, many of these traditions continue in altered form or are undergoing wholesale cultural revival; they should be considered neither “dead” nor “lost.”

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